People will occasionally ask me why I’m a boater. It’s usually asked with genuine curiosity, and sometimes with the faint suspicion that I’ve chosen an unnecessarily complicated way to live. What they’re really asking is: What’s the payoff? Is it the destinations? The sunsets? The escape?
Curiously, people rarely ask me why I’m a writer. No one asks me what the most enjoyable part of writing is. In a world of streaming content and slickly produced podcasts, even I sometimes wonder why I bother with the written word, especially when there are faster, easier ways to fill the silence.
And yet for me, boating and writing grew out of the same place. It is true that I discovered one and later tacked the other onto it, but each came from a need to explore, just one externally and one internally. Today they quietly reinforce each other, as if I could no longer imagine doing either without the other in the background.
Maybe I would have found writing if I’d never owned a boat. Maybe I would have ended up here through some other path. But that’s not how it happened, and I’ve learned to trust the order in which things enter our lives. Sequence and context matter. Boats taught me how to stay with things long enough for meaning to emerge. The writing followed. Both demand the same commitment: You have to do them to be good at them.
That sounds obvious, almost trivial, but it’s a truth we too often avoid. We admire the finished essay, the confident captain, the well-executed passage, without always acknowledging the long stretch of awkwardness and uncertainty that precedes competence. Proficiency in seamanship and writing comes from time. You get there by showing up—again and again—often without much to show for it in the moment.
Operating a boat has a way of insisting on presence. It doesn’t care what else you’re thinking about or how distracted you feel. The sea demands a level of attention and is not generous with those who withhold it. Writing demands the same kind of concentration. When it’s working, the noise falls away. You fully inhabit ideas—turning them over, testing their weight. It’s slow. It’s often uncomfortable. And like boating, it rewards patience more than talent.
People often assume that boating is about escape, and that writing is about self-expression. I think both assumptions miss the point. Boating, at least for me, has never been about getting away from the world. It’s about entering it more fully. Our life aboard strips things down to what matters most. Many of the abstractions that clutter daily life—status, urgency, noise—lose their grip offshore. You still think about the world, but you do so from a place that’s quieter and more honest.
Writing does the same thing for me. It’s not an escape from thought; it’s a confrontation with it. Ideas that feel perfectly reasonable in my head often collapse when put on paper. My sentences reveal gaps I didn’t know were there. Writing exposes weaknesses in my thinking the way a following sea can expose weaknesses in my seamanship. That’s not a flaw. That’s the point.
Both boating and writing bring me face to face with reality. I can’t fake my way through a night passage or a quality paragraph. They require a kind of earned confidence—one that comes not from certainty, but from a willingness to sit with uncertainty.
Like boating, writing also connects me with a wider world, just on a longer time scale. When I put words on a page and send them out into the world, I’m participating in a conversation, the other half of which I may never know. Readers show up months or years later with a sentence I barely remember writing, sharing how it mattered to them. That kind of connection is quiet but durable. It doesn’t rely on volume or speed. It relies on resonance.
In both cases, the connection comes not from broadcasting, but from honesty. Boats don’t tolerate pretense. Neither does prose. You can posture all you want at the dock or on the page, but once conditions change—and they always do—you’re revealed for what you are. Competence, humility, and curiosity age well. Ego does not.
I think that’s why our life aboard, and my writing, cannot be replaced by easier substitutes. You can watch endless videos about cruising without ever leaving your chair. But the experience of doing—the slow accumulation of judgment, the quiet satisfaction of understanding something just a little better than before—only happens through engagement. There’s a difference between consuming and participating, and both boats and books live firmly on the participation side of that divide.
Our life aboard has taught us that some pleasures can’t be rushed and shouldn’t be optimized. A long passage isn’t something to be conquered as efficiently as possible; it’s something to be lived through attentively. Writing, and reading for that matter, work the same way. The goal isn’t to get to the end of the page, but to inhabit it long enough for something true to surface.
There are days when the sea is lumpy and uncooperative, when progress feels hard-won and joy is in short supply. There are days when writing feels the same, when sentences refuse to behave and the page gives nothing back. But in both cases, showing up matters more than how you feel about it. Momentum is built over time, not through inspiration but through habit. Neither pursuit offers constant reward.
So here are the real answers—I boat and write for interrelated reasons: Boating has taught me how to live with complexity without needing to escape it. Writing has taught me how to make sense of that complexity without pretending it’s simpler than it is. Both remind me that the richest parts of life still require time, effort, and a willingness to stay with things long after the novelty wears off.
What a life shaped by boats and words has taught me most is that depth still matters, even in a world that seems determined to flatten everything. Attention still matters. Craft still matters. And the things that endure tend to be the things that ask something of us in return.
This article originally appeared in the June/July 2026 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
